Urban planning is a highly practical discipline as my peer-reviewer Richard Hu says. In this context, classical learning style doesn’t help students to develop their skills to be professionals. Because as a planner they are required to play various roles in practice: as analyst, designer, advocate, manager, mediator, educator, and facilitator (Fischler, 2012). My personal beliefs about the ways in which students learn are; students synthesize planning theory and practice, by putting themselves as planner in hypothetical situation in the process of learning. Students critically analyse and evaluate the existing practices to identify how the planners have coped with the issues and challenges and what are the past failures that they shouldn’t repeat. I agree with Schonwetter et al. (2002) that mentions ‘Effective teaching results from a synergy among learning principles, personal characteristics, and discipline and institutional cultures’. In my discipline this ‘synergy’ really helps students to achieve leaning outcomes. Therefore the ‘Deep approach’ (Biggs and Tang, 2007) is applied in my classes. I include ‘visit to local councils’, ‘visit to urban development site’, ‘role-playing’ in my class to help develop skills as planner. I refer to ‘the important thing is that relating all teaching methods to particular goals for student learning’ (Ramsden, 2003), and ‘Informed by intellectual curiosity, methodological rigor, and good judgement, comprehensive approach to urban development enables planners to attend to a wide array of factors and to synthesize a large number of elements into meaningful, creative schemes ( Fischer, 2012). Assignment in my class is to demonstrate their knowledge and its application to practice. For example, the second assignment of my unit ‘Planning theory and process 2’ was group presentation which students were to work together in teams of up to 5 people to present a critique of a local urban plan to provide advice to the local council meeting.
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